Testing Chat Episode VI: Return of the Chat

[magic princess]

^ For what it's worth I find your ideas very interesting.

I disagree with a lot of them but I find them interesting.

I love the fact that we have been able to correspond so civilly for so long despite our profoundly different points of view. That's the kind of world I want to exist.

...Of course, in 1920 we'd kill each other, but to me that's just the other side of the coin.

[Stofsk]

what, no calling the otherside a hatfucking so-and-so

what kind of internet debate is this

[Jung]

I love the fact that we have been able to correspond so civilly for so long despite our profoundly different points of view. That's the kind of world I want to exist.

Same here. It's a genuine pleasure, and you've actually non-trivially influenced me, even if I still basically agree with David Brin about your ideology (as nearly as I can figure it out).

Though I always suspect I get more out of the exchange than you, as I probably just tell you stuff you've already heard from a bunch of other people.

[thejester]

you are an actual loony tune

just fyi

It is glorious to be mad. Embrace the Mad! Sanity is for the weak...

Yeah but that's exactly it, isn't it? These are just fantasies that you construct because you like constructing them. I mean it's the internet, so go nuts, but you're basically playing a pseudo-intellectual RPG.

[evilsoup]

mang honestly I'm not entirely comfortable with calling people you disagree with mad

What exactly is so great about you existing that we (general we, I'm not English) should let other people emigrate because they remind you of your family?

Well obviously I'm the greatest person that ever lived and by communicating with me on the Internet you've guaranteed yourself a footnote in the annals of history.

The notion of a universalist morality implicit in the idea of world socialist revolution advocated here, I have come to believe, is the most poisonous event on any kind of person outside of the central 60% mean of a population who ever tries to live on this earth.

All that the rationalist modern world of capitalist democracy has done is create rigid and inflexible religio-cultural combinations: Look at the UK, where homosexuality was only banned in the 19th century. It was only the rise of a bourgeoisie who had modern notions of morality who aggressively lobbied, under the guise of the Liberal party, for criminalization of homosexuality and pornography.

Both of these things are in the same paragraph, but I'm struggling to work out why. Socialism and capitalism aren't... the same thing. Of course socialism came out of capitalism (or rather, the Marx-derived socialism that holds sway; of course there have always been Diggers and Mazdakists and Yellow Turbans), but the same is true of what you're proposing.

[thejester]

mang honestly I'm not entirely comfortable with calling people you disagree with mad

if you think my use of the phrase 'looney tune' was intended to actually suggest magic princess has a mental illness, I apologise

[Ralin]

Well obviously I'm the greatest person that ever lived and by communicating with me on the Internet you've guaranteed yourself a footnote in the annals of history.

I'm planning to do my doctorate in Hong Kong in large part because I figure that'll leave me halfway or better to permanent residency by the time I'm done. I like Hong Kong more than any other place I've lived and offers a very good standard of living if you have education and money. After that I plan to adopt the typical Hong Kong attitude of denying that same residency whenever possible to other potential immigrants, because Hong Kong will not remain a good and wealthy place to live if a bunch of mainlanders are allowed to emigrate en masse.

I grew up pretty poor. If there's one thing that experience taught me it's that poor people tend to be stupid shitheads, and that if you manage to climb out of that the first thing you want to do is pull the ladder up behind you so the others can't follow. In practice this does put me in agreement with xenophobic racists on some points, but really I'd rather live with that than have people shitting on the sidewalks where I live.

[adr]

The notion of a universalist morality implicit in the idea of world socialist revolution advocated here

Eh, this needs more explanation, I think we're not as far apart as it might seem on the surface (at least speaking for me personally). I don't believe in a world government like some socialists do.

What I envision is a world where there's optional bottom-up cooperation from self-formed groups that are otherwise left alone. These groups may be and probably would be radically different, there's no central authority telling them what to do, and this btw includes the enforcement of human rights* (which is just hypocritical warmongering propaganda from the ruling class in practice anyway) but they would all peacefully coexist.

The bottom-up coperation comes from them voluntarily signing onto shared interoperability standards, and of course voluntarily participating in the creations of them. A group my also enter into a treaty with reservations; it needn't be a package deal. This can let them work together as wanted without having to sacrifice their internal customs etc.

* If somebody is personally feeling oppressed though, they should have a way to leave their group. Important that this comes from the person's own feeling of oppression; no outsider has the right to tell you that your life is better or worse than you think it is.

This might include covert programs to smuggle people out of groups that decide to close their borders in cases... which could be a problem but I have a hard time thinking of a way to balance these desires between free people and free societies and think freedom of exit - not necessary freedom of /joining/ any group is the best I have right now. Sure, there's potential for brain drain there but if the world is fairly equitable to begin with - this is what I really mean by "global revolution" - I think that'll be ok. idk tho.

[adr]

so re my silly crush, this is so absurd

i'm p sure there's nothing mutual there at all (or if there is, she has better sense than i)... but her companion keeps smiling so much and has now picked three spiders out of my hair (seriously, how many spiders am i picking up? i lean against trees a lot so i guess it is possible but still blargh i kinda think she's just looking for an excuse to touch me. i'm not sure where the line between reality and fantasy is anymore ) and the stupid part of my brain isn't very smart

so it is all like she warped in and was all like "all right, now we've given them something else to shoot at"

and me being a fool, i'm all like "ah the game's afoot huh"

[magic princess]

Socialism and capitalism both derive from post-enlightenment modernist ways of viewing the world, founded in scientific rationalism; that's why they can be discussed as two sides of the same coin. Both the modern democratic capitalist system and international socialism presume that the entire world operates best on a single mode of doing things, implicitly that there is a single law which is best in each category of society, that there is a single optimal outcome for humans. They simply differ on what those laws, on what that outcome, is. Both ultimately suppose that national variation is a hindrance and a bad thing. Peculiarly, both systems propose that the ideas of white men are correct ones for the entire world. They come out of the same missionary impulse as white Christianity: They have no room for different forms of knowledge or different systems of organisation because of that universalist impulse. Intrinsically, capitalism and socialism are both racist to the core and rely implicitly on the notion that setting down a model white system in Australia or Argentina results in the same outcome as in England, and that this is a good thing; the natives are judged and condemned according to their adherence to the universalist model being deployed against them. There is one right, and one wrong, and we may disagree on which but white Europeans discovered both competing absolute truths (western Europeans, even! Russians aren't allowed to want anything except German socialism or British democratic capitalism either).

[adr]

BTW remember that book i didn't wanna write back in september?

it is out now

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/com ... ists_of_d/

http://www.packtpub.com/discover-advant ... kbook/book

[Bob the Gunslinger]

what, no calling the otherside a hatfucking so-and-so

what kind of internet debate is this

It's just a conversation, you trollfisting drizzledump.

[Stofsk]

stop being a penis

[Gands]

I DISAGREE WITH EVERYTHING

[magic princess]

Yeah but that's exactly it, isn't it? These are just fantasies that you construct because you like constructing them. I mean it's the internet, so go nuts, but you're basically playing a pseudo-intellectual RPG.

I thought to just briefly note that since my religious beliefs are inextricably interlinked with my philosophical beliefs now that if you don't believe in my religion these statements are to a certain extent fantasy by definition; however, taken individually I like to think that some of what I bring up is useful, or at least requires you to self-reflect to respond to relatively unusual critiques of your own beliefs. I also believe both that I take my views seriously as correct and viable ones (just not in immediate time-scales) and that they remain internally coherent.

Also even with the extreme subset of traditionalist goddess feminism there's a surprisingly large number of people, as Jung can attest to my veracity; I believe at present there are six functional churches of the Mother Goddess in the United States and three in the UK-Ireland, and a similar subset of beliefs is held by the Maetreum in upstate New York.

[Oxymoron]

I'm getting a lot of 502 Bad Gateway errors on New Testingstan since a few minutes when posting / editing. I'm using my phone's connection, which currently has a limited bandwidth (to ~15KB/s). Is that the cause?

[xon]

It looks like the register page didn't like one of the php updates.

[evilsoup]

Chilean artist burns $500000 worth of student debt

It's things like this that give me hope.

[Oxymoron]

An abject act of terrorism.

[Ralin]

They seriously only had paper records?

[Oxymoron]

As I understand it, the digital records got seized by the Police during the University foreclosure or something like that, and they somehow got lost - genuinely lost or erased, your guess is as good as mine.

[Civil War Man]

Reminds me of Pretty Boy Floyd. I read that whenever he robbed a bank, he would burn all of their mortgage documents.

[adr]

so i was having a chat earlier today about remembering where you were for an event being a signifier for age

i was like "my dad remembers where he was for the moon landing .... i remember where i was on 9/11"

and the young person with me was like "i remember the virginia tech shooting. i was at columbine at the time"

verily verily i say to you that america needs another thing people remember that isn't about death

we need a moon landing for the new generation

[thejester]

I remember where I was when Peter Brock died

[magic princess]

We were at least having a steady alternating sequence of good and bad for a while: "When the news came down the wire that the Maine had exploded..."
"...Orville and Wilbur's first airplane flight..."
"...11 Minute of the 11th Day of the 11th Hour when the Great War finally ended in Armistice."
"....When Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic.."
"...Pearl Harbour..."
And then good things stop and we have JFK, Martin Luther King, and RFK before the Moonshot, and then we go back to things that suck.